These are projects posted by the students of Dr. Gove Allen at Brigham Young University. These students have taken one semester-long course on VBA and generally have had no prior programming experience

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Automated Sales Tax Calculator

Executive Summary

For the past year, I have worked in the accounting department for an alarm installation company and I have been responsible for sales tax reporting. The alarm installation company installs and maintains low-voltage alarm systems. They partner with major alarm companies to install and service alarm systems in all 50 states. We have to file and pay sales tax in every state and by doing so are required to report our sales for each county in those states.

Filing sales tax is a time consuming process and each year we would spend more than 400 hours to completely file sales tax. For this project, I set out to automate the entire sales tax process to save time and improve accuracy. By using VBA I have created an automated calculator that has already proven to be very efficient. By implementing it in the last month, we have already seen a significant decrease in the time spent on sales tax. I am expecting that we will be able to lower the filing time down from days to hours each month and even reduce the total time spent on sales tax to less than 90 hours annually. This calculator is already reducing the time by more than 75% and is going to save the company more than $4,500 annually.

The purpose of the automated sales tax calculator to organize the company’s sales data, calculate the amount of sales and deductions in each state and county, and display the results effectively to make filing sales tax significantly easier. The calculator is an asset to the company and has been dynamically developed in case of any changes to our system or changes with state tax laws. Therefore, allowing it to adapt to changes as they are made.